Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore will change the way we think not just about Whitman, but about our relationship to poetry. In the space of these inspired dialogues, lyric essays, and poems, Botsford takes us back and forth across oceans of the imagination, of time and space, to arrive finally back where we started: contemplating a body of literature, only now reinvigorated with deep spiritual energy and laden with the fullness of the enlightened soul. Reading this is unlike no other reading you will do. It transcends the borders of genre, time, imagination, and crosses over into the purely experiential. Alan Botsford, and Walt Whitman himself, dare you to stand on the precipice of true art, sway back and forth in awe, and to fall in.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A new kind of book about whitman!,
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This review is from: Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore (Hardcover)
This is the best book about Uncle Walt to appear in a long time. Free of jargon and arch, critical poses, Alan Botsford (a poet, himself) approaches Whitman afresh, with open heart and mind, and, taking us along, explores the spiritual/corporeal terrain that develops between Whitman and his sympathetic readers. The book begins with interviews with Whitman, conducted by the book's persona--lively, humorous and wise dialogues that successfully capture Whitman's voice and presence.
The middle section includes some of the best critical essays written about Walt Whitman. In "Whitman and Us," my personal favorite, Botsford says this: "Indeed, in its generosity of spirit, its abundance of love, its depth of wisdom, Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' offers readers an order of experience different from what we would expect from modern works of art, for Whitman returns the work of art to its original and primary function: a vehicle of awakening, of enlightenment.'" These are the words that much contemporary literary criticism tends to avoid. After these enlightening essays, the third part of the book offers Botsford's own poetry as a sympathetic response to Whitman's work. Here we take off on our own journey through the opened terrain, upon that open road, which Botsford has helped us to discover. The voice of the poems is one refreshed and remade through its encounter with Whitman's own voice. We hear in these poems the promise that Whitman's poetic legacy will continue.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Whitman for the 21st Century,
This review is from: Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore (Hardcover)
This is an exhilarating book. Alan Botsford demonstrates, in words as direct as Whitman's own, insights into the poetry's spiritual nature and its relevance to the reader in this moment. His sharp language is often radically amusing, but always serious. The effect focuses ones attention on the erotic unity of body and soul as reflected in the language of everyday, as well as in the high art of poetry. The writing utilizes our most common expressions as well as our archetypal and folkloric heritage to confirm a way forward for the individual and for the society he or she affects. These insights heal and promote growth for the reader in moments of breathtaking clarity. Clearly, Botsford's aim, like Whitman's, is transformative. In poems, essays, and dialogues, he reveals an understanding of the world anchored in a reading of "Leaves of Grass" that reconciles the seeming paradox of matter and spirit, life and death, and self and other. Not through argument but through art, through insight and sensitivity. In images, too, of transformation occurring through commerce between self and other, in crisis, and in confrontation with death. This book deserves a place beside C. K. Williams' wonderful new book "On Whitman." What a banner year this is for Walt Whitman, and for the "United States of the Soul."
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